


Ironic Bull Piercings

by PlushRumpFactory



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/F, M/M, Piercings, Sopor Slime
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-19
Updated: 2013-06-19
Packaged: 2017-12-15 11:13:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,197
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/848882
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PlushRumpFactory/pseuds/PlushRumpFactory
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dave/Tavros ficlet, inspired by a writing prompt, DISCONTINUED INDEFINITELY<br/>Dave thinks it would be pretty ironic if he gave Tavros a couple piercings. Tavros is more than willing to comply.<br/>(Originally posted 4/16/2012)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ironic Bull Piercings

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this from a prompt I had in my school's writing club (I had to include a silver spoon, daisies, and earrings). This was written in 2012 so please forgive the many, many things that completely disregard canon. In fact just consider it an AU.   
> In any case, I hope you like it!

You are Tavros Nitram, and you are on your way to the Dave human’s respiteblock. You just left the food preparation block where you were talking to Gamzee (and trying to ignore Karkat’s consistent complaining to his moirail). You are turning the corner in the hallway between the humans’ rooms and the transportalizer when you hear voices. You make out Feferi and Eridan’s voices as well as the Dave human’s. They are mostly speaking English, telling from the noises you can faintly make out, but occasionally one of them will slip into Alternian.   
Feferi is giggling now, her voice making odd glub noises, hers the most earth-like accent of all the trolls here. Eridan’s is close, their voices formed by the calm sea instead of the harsh air of Alternia. Your own accent is thick enough that you will often resort to typing messages to the humans instead of speaking to them, even when you are in the same room. The humans have trouble understanding the landdwellers among you; an understandable predicament, considering their flowing, song-like accents, contrasted so sharply against the noises native to Alternians.  
You speak with a series of noises strung together, not melodic sounds like English (an extremely difficult to master language, at least the spoken form), but harsh hisses and clicking and growls and grunts. Even when one of the humans tried to learn Alternian they couldn’t speak right; their anatomy is different. If they try to hiss is sounds light and airy, and the clicking noise is slow, dulled by their tongue instead of small organs in their throats. All in all, the lot of you spends more time talking to each other through Pesterchum than through the air, even after meeting up. The only ones who regularly speak instead of using computers are Feferi and Eridan.  
The Dave human has been attempting to learn Alternian, and for how different it is (and the parts he is lacking to make the correct noises) he is making really good progress. He can communicate pretty well with you, and he is the only one who doesn’t regularly use Pesterchum to talk to everyone.  
You are watching around a corner, listening to the smooth wavy sounds of their voices, the high pitched keen of Feferi laughing, the much lower growl from Eridan in displeasure, the monotonous droning of the Dave human. The Rose human joins them as well, and you can see that she has a new pair of earrings, big silver balls in the center of a boxy frame dangling from her ears. You reach up and feel the small silver metal stud in your own ear. You found it so fascinating when you saw the humans had the little pieces of metal in them, and the Rose human and Kanaya offered to give you some as well. They hurt at first, and for a few weeks you couldn’t let them touch anything. It wasn’t much of a problem since your horns generally hit anything before it could get near your ears.  
Now you simply love them, and can’t resist playing with them, circling them in your ears, hanging things off of them. The Dave human has told you that you can put more in your ears, and says he has a thing called gauges which makes the hole in your ear bigger. You are planning on going to his room for what he has dubbed “the ironic bull-piercing” and you have no idea what it means but you just need more silver in your skin.  
Feferi and Eridan are leaving now, going the other way, presumably to their respiteblocks. You wonder vaguely who they are filling their quadrants with; Eridan seems to have been turned down so many times you don’t think he has any other one filled, but it seems unlikely that Feferi doesn’t have at least one or two others. It doesn’t really matter, it’s none of your business, and you’re not sure why you are even thinking about something so private to them, especially when you have no intention of nearing any of their quadrants.  
The Rose human goes into Dave’s respiteblock and he follows, and a few minutes later you deem the coast clear and knock on the door. It opens up to Rose’s surprised face, obviously not having expected a visitor. Dave is sitting on his horizontal plush sleeping apparatus which you long ago learned humans sleep on instead of in a recuperacoon. Rose welcomes you in, and Dave explains that he is going to give you a few more piercings tonight, and she is welcome to join you if she likes. She says that she would be happy to but she just wanted to deliver a gift. She tells you both to have a fun time then leaves, you presume to her own respiteblock, although there is no way to know for sure. You don’t really care, anyways. Your place for tonight is with Dave, your favorite human.  
You turn around to greet Dave to find a white thing in your face. You freak out at the discovery, but once he takes it away from your face you realize that it is just a fragile white liquid container. You are not sure what is in it; it looks like some oddly shaped white grass. Dave sees your curious look, and explains that it is a human thing called a vase, and the things in it are called daisies. You nod, although you have no idea what he’s talking about. You assume that this is the gift Rose gave him, and that he is keeping it for ironic purposes. You don’t really care, and mostly you just want to get on with the plan for the night.  
Dave doesn’t look excited, but you’ve never seen any look on his face other than his poker face, so you can assume he’s excited as well. You have to assume a lot of things with Dave, although recently you are starting to be able to read the very subtle changes indicating his emotions. You pride yourself in this skill.  
You watch as Dave sets up, pulling things out of his sylladex and forming a miniature workstation on the table, which has been cleared of everything else and pulled next to his bed. There is an abundance of needles, in varying sizes, in sealed plastic containers, as well as a small black bag and two small fire-making devices. There’s also a bowl of chilled gelatinous cubes which you assume is probably for numbing your skin. You didn’t use them the first time, when you got the original piercing in your ears, but you appreciate that Dave though of this.  
Dave opens the black bag and pulls out more metal jewelry and you ask him how many he is planning on doing. He says however many he can fit. You find this an attractive idea and do not object to it in the least. You don’t say anything out loud. As usual, Dave takes your lack of an answer as acceptance.  
As Dave finishes preparing everything he holds a chilled gelatinous cube to your ear for a minute, until you can’t feel when he pinches it. As he grabs the needle you realize that you are shaking. He pauses with the needle about an inch away from your skin, hovering with an air of uncertainty.  
“You afraid or something, Tavbro? I haven’t even started on the worst ones yet.” You shake your head; you are not afraid, not of this. You realize that you are not shaking; you are quivering with excitement, wanting the feeling of the metal sliding cleanly through your skin.  
“No, I, uh, I’m just kind of, excited„, uhm, just go on, and ignore it, maybe, please?” He studies your face for a minute, and it’s slightly uncomfortable the way you can’t see his eyes behind the shades but his body language lets you read him like a book. He is worried that you’re not telling the truth, that you don’t really want him to do this, that he’s making you do it just because he wants to. You give him a smile, trying to comfort him, telling him silently that yes, you want him to do it, and he visibly loosens up. His muscles seem to relax and he looks as if he just took a breath after holding it in for a long time. You can only tell these things because you spend almost every minute you have around Dave and are now basically fluent in his language.  
Finally, after an agonizing minute of waiting (in which the chilled gelatinous cube melted most of the way and started sliding goopy chunks down your shirt), Dave continues. He holds an earring in-between his teeth as he slides the needle through the thick skin of your earlobe, deftly inserting it in the hole left behind. You think that he seems to have a lot of experience at this, even though he doesn’t have any visible piercings himself. He repeats the process at least fifteen more times on either ear, and when all is said and done there are a few trickles of brown blood and a throbbing pain in your ear as well as the satisfactory tug of gravity against the heavy metal jewelry in your ears.  
He moves onto your face now; the chilled gelatinous cubes are being held against different parts of your face, you don’t bother to keep track at this point, until your whole face is cold and tingly and just a little bit slimy. Dave wipes some of the slime off with his sleeve. You don’t feel it anymore. He seems to take longer with these ones; carefully contemplating the position of each metal rod before it is slid underneath your skin. He starts with one small ring on your eyebrow, and then decides to put another ring directly next to it. It is only after a small smirk that he pulls a curved barbell through the skin in the middle of your olfactory flaps which he calls a “septum.” You don’t understand why it is so amusing; you admire it for a few moments in the mirror, realizing that it looks like Tinkerbull’s and wondering if Dave knew about that.  
Dave simply presses on after letting you look at that piercing. He puts a ring through your bottom lip. A little more blood comes out of this one than the others, but Dave nonchalantly wipes it off with the towel he has, one corner already dyed a dark brown in one corner from your ears. He focuses his attention upwards again, inserting a plain barbell in-between your eyes. You can see it if you cross your eyes, but it makes you dizzy, so you stop trying. By the time you realize what is happening Dave is sliding off your shirt, being extremely careful that it doesn’t pull at any of your new piercings or touch your horns more than is necessary.   
You have vestigial grub leg nubs, three on each side, which Dave finds hilarious for some reason. Speaking of, Dave has another chilled gelatinous cube, and this one he is circling lightly around the little nubs on your side, until he deems them sufficiently numbed and repeats the process with the other one. He instructs you to lie down, and of course, you listen. He sets the half-melted cube on the base of your throat as he puts a small ring in each of your vestigial grub leg nubs. It’s kind of weird and ticklish, to have someone else touch them; generally they aren’t touched in Alternian culture. Dave doesn’t know that, though, and you don’t exactly care if he does, so you don’t bother telling him that it’s kind of taboo. He’d probably not do it again if you told him, which is exactly the reason you don’t. He has the most adora-hilarious fascination with them. Every time you are together he finds some excuse to lift your shirt and just run his fingers over them. Sometimes he doesn’t even have an excuse; he just does it without any warning. Sometimes when you don’t expect it you squirm under his fingers, which are always really cold. This used to happen all the time, but now you’re pretty used to it.  
You’re glad there’s barely any feeling in them; you’d miss it if Dave stopped messing with them because of the rings, and also the numb feeling from the chilled gelatinous cubes is wearing off and it kind of feels like someone punched you in the ears really hard. You think that it must show on your face because Dave balances fresh cubes on your ears, immediately providing relief. You don’t really pay attention to what he’s doing until you feel his fingers on your collarbone a few minutes later, experimentally pulling and pinching at the skin there. You try to lower your head and watch, but it makes the cubes slide uncomfortably on your ears and you don’t even have a halfway good view before Dave puts two of his fingers on your chin and tilts your head back again. You realize that he is most likely going to pierce your collarbone.  
He does, his cold hands dancing across the skin, you have no idea what he’s doing but you really can’t feel anything beyond the feather-light touch of his fingers and the tingling numb sensation of your skin and the heavy pull of the needle, no pain filtering through your nerves yet, only pleasant buzzing sensations. You would do a lot to keep this feeling forever, just locked in a haze of shaking, buzzing nerves spread across your skin.  
Now that you think about it, the chilled gelatinous cubes more than likely have something to do with this haze. The feeling is so similar to that one time Gamzee convinced you to try his sopor pie and the cubes are both slimy and green, and you’ve never actually seen anyone use them before other than to put on wounds to keep bleeding down. You can still feel some of the slime sitting heavily, balanced on your face just above your lip. You can’t help it; you lick it off, swallowing it with a heavy feeling on your tongue. You almost laugh when the thought occurs to you that Dave has basically unknowingly drugged you. Karkat would have a field day if he found out about this. And by field day, you obviously mean an extremely long, drawn-out rant about inter-cultural sensitivity and why he hates Dave (in a platonic manner!) so much because he violates all the rules laid out in the first half of the rant. This is always a hilarious event, but there are only so many times you can all sit through a three-hour-long rant without going insane.  
Your shoulders are feeling uncomfortable now, not exactly pain but a dull pounding sensation spreading up your neck. You don’t exactly care for this and decide to take things into your own hands. By that you mean reaching over to the desk and grabbing one of the cubes out of the bowl, letting it melt under your tongue before swallowing the slime heavily. You repeat the process four or five times before the pounding feeling finally dulls into a light pressure. By now the world is kind of spinning and you’re so high on the rush that you don’t notice Dave has removed everything except the bowl of half-melted cubes and is just sitting at the desk watching you as interestedly as he can appear with his shades and poker face still in place.  
For a second you feel self-conscious at how silly you must look, coated in a thin layer of green slime with brown blood steadily dripping out of all the new holes in your body. But that second passes and you are lost in confusion as to why there are two Daves sitting in front of you. Their faces twist and you realize that the funny hissing noises they are making is an attempt at Alternian. You don’t understand a word of it, but you chitter a reply back anyway. You are not even sure that what you said made sense in any language but you can’t bring yourself to really care, clicking in laughter at the expressions the Daves make at whatever you just said.  
He repeats the noises he made before, but this time you sort of understand it; he said something about a recuperacoon. That’s silly; you don’t know why he’d want to sleep in your recuperacoon, considering that the humans had found out the hard way that prolonged exposure to sopor slime was toxic for humans. You tell him so, kind of slurring a few of your words together in your hurry to get it out. He just raises an eyebrow, and you think maybe he didn’t understand, since he’s pretty new to speaking Alternian, so you repeat it. This time you stress every noise, putting lots of space in-between words, as if you were speaking to a wriggler.  
The thought of Dave as a wriggler is hilarious, so you laugh again. He continues to watch you with a raised eyebrow, says something about a recuperacoon again, then takes a hold of your arm and leads you out of the room. You continue telling him things as he walks you out of the room and off to somewhere else, and mostly you don’t even know what you’re saying, your mouth is just moving of its own accord. Dave just stares resolutely ahead, occasionally adjusting his grip on your arm, dead set on reaching his destination. Eventually he sits you down next to a door and tells you to stay there (you paid close attention, everything Dave says is important, and you listen to him). He goes into the door and a few minutes later comes back out with Karkat, explaining something to him in a whisper. The look on Karkat’s face is really funny and you can’t help but laugh at him, which seems to make him even angrier. He’s holding his anger in though, he hasn’t yelled at all yet, just grabs you by the arm and pulls you along the hallway again.  
Karkat’s voice carries you, his sharp, angry words prodding you to continue walking as he leads you down the hallway. Dave is following you, staying a few feet behind, and you have been talking to Karkat this whole time, you don’t know if you ever stopped since you started talking to Dave, you’re not in control of your words anymore, things are just spilling past your lips and Dave is being unnervingly silent and Karkat just gives you an odd look whenever you say things. It almost makes you falter and stop speaking, but you continue on anyway, because you don’t know what else to do.  
The walk down the hallway seems to last forever, until you realize that Karkat is leading you through a door and you’re in your respiteblock now, your temporary recuperacoon set up in the corner. He puts his finger on your lips, shooshing you until you stop speaking. It’s uncomfortably quiet now without your voice filling up the empty air. Karkat strips you of the rest of your clothes and you feel wrong, he’s not your moirail, you don’t have one but he does and it’s like an affair and he’s helping you climb into your recuperacoon as the world spins around you.  
The last thing you hear before you drift off to sleep is Karkat yelling.  
You are Dave Strider, and you have messed up big time. Everything was going fine until Tavros had starting eating those weird cubes of jelly. You had figured it wasn’t your business to stop him, if the troll wanted to eat frozen green slime it obviously wasn’t up to you to stop him. Except apparently it was, because it was that sopor slime crap that they sleep in and aren’t supposed to eat (except for Gamzee, apparently) and you apparently just unknowingly drugged Tavros.  
You were honestly kind of freaked out when he started eating the cubes and acting like he was on drugs, but you were pretty sure you could handle it. That is, until he started saying…things. You can’t say with one hundred percent certainty what he was saying, you’ve only been working on your Alternian for a few months, but you’re pretty sure he was making some “flushed” advances on you and that was the line. You didn’t have a plan, this wasn’t supposed to happen, and what the hell are you supposed to do when a drugged troll starts coming onto you in a language you only halfway understand? So you proceeded to do the worst thing you could possibly do, but also basically the only thing.  
You took the situation to Karkat.  
You know that everyone’s gonna be pretty pissed at you tomorrow or whenever Karkat decides he wants to call a meeting to rehash the rules of inter-cultural etiquette and yell at you, because you are pretty sure you have managed to break all of them, yet again. He keeps inventing new ones just to cover things you have done that he wants to yell at you for, so each time he does it it takes more and more time to list all the rules and explain how you have managed to break them. Every extra minute everyone has to spend in there is an extra hour they stay mad at you for interrupting whatever they were doing. Whatever, it’s not your business if Rose and Kanaya want to bone in the middle of the fucking day, and if they do it’s not your fault if they get interrupted. You’ve never asked Karkat to call up one of those stupid meetings; he does it on his own. And if he wasn’t blaming it on you, he’d find some other totally nonsensical reason to have meetings, so really you’re being quite heroic by taking the blame for all of this.  
Karkat’s finishing what you started, taking off Tavros’s pants and leading him to his recuperacoon, but you don’t have very much time to contemplate it before Karkat is turning on you and yelling. You can’t understand because he’s speaking in Alternian and everything is going so fast that you can’t register the difference between the noises he’s making anymore. You cut him off with a hand lightly pressed to his arm and a “hey, speak English please?” And he quiets down for a few moments then starts speaking in English, his accent blurring the words and god damn it, this is almost worse than when he was speaking Alternian. You tell him to shut up in English, then explain in Alternian (very patiently and stuttered with mispronounced noises that you just aren’t used to making) that he needs to calm down and explain things slowly enough for you to understand because his accent is too hard to understand when he speaks English.  
Karkat is shocked that you can say all that in Alternian and you tell him that you have been having Feferi help you with the translations and Tavros with the pronunciation since he’s been too busy frolicking with John. He is much more calm now, his muscles relaxing and you weren’t really sure it was possible to calm him down if you weren’t John or Gamzee (and sometimes not even Gamzee could do that, but John tended to be able to work miracles when it came to Karkat’s temper), but you’re not exactly going to complain about it. Keeping Karkat subdued is the first step in your plan, tentatively titled “Calm Karkat the fuck down and figure out what the hell happened with Tavros earlier because honestly that shit was really insane and then figure out a way to fix whatever damage was caused.” (You think maybe you’ve been hanging around the trolls a little bit too much because your names for everything are just becoming longer and longer as time goes on. You made a song the other day that had a title a whole paragraph long.)  
Now for step two: finding out where exactly you went wrong. Or, more accurately, squeezing the information out of Karkat like the last remnants of those liquid lollipop candy tubes. A hard feat to accomplish, and it may leave some remnants of pain for a few days, but it is just something that you can’t stop yourself from doing it. And when you think about it later, you really didn’t have a choice in the matter, because if you didn’t get it then everyone would walk away disappointed.  
Then again, you think that you could just put a cap on the tube and save it until tomorrow, because honestly you are tired out and Karkat is giving you the “I’m going to call a meeting Strider, just watch me” look, and you want to get some sleep before the meeting that will inevitably be called in the morning. You are way too tired to deal with Karkat’s attitude right now.


End file.
